At this finally Mr. Longdon turned. “The effort—on the lines you speak of—for Nanda’s happiness?”
She fairly glowed with hope. “And by the same token such a piece of poetic justice! Quite the loveliest it would be, I think, one had ever heard of.”
So, for some time more, they sat confronted. “I don’t quite see your difficulty,” he said at last. “I do happen to know, I confess, that Nanda herself extremely desires the execution of your project.”
His friend’s smile betrayed no surprise at this effect of her eloquence. “You’re bad at dodging. Nanda’s desire is inevitably to stop off for herself every question of any one but Vanderbank. If she wants me to succeed in arranging with Mr. Mitchett can you ask for a plainer sign of her private predicament? But you’ve signs enough, I see”—she caught herself up: “we may take them all for granted. I’ve known perfectly from the first that the only difficulty would come from her mother—but also that that would be stiff.”
The movement with which Mr. Longdon removed his glasses might have denoted a certain fear to participate in too much of what the Duchess had known. “I’ve not been ignorant that Mrs. Brookenham favours Mr. Mitchett.”
But he was not to be let off with that. “Then you’ve not been blind, I suppose, to her reason for doing so.” He might not have been blind, but his vision, at this, scarce showed sharpness, and it determined in his interlocutress the shortest of short cuts. “She favours Mr. Mitchett because she wants ‘old Van’ herself.”
He was evidently conscious of looking at her hard. “In what sense—herself?”
“Ah you must supply the sense; I can give you only the fact—and it’s the fact that concerns us. Voyons” she almost impatiently broke out; “don’t try to create unnecessary obscurities by being unnecessarily modest. Besides, I’m not touching your modesty. Supply any sense whatever that may miraculously satisfy your fond English imagination: I don’t insist in the least on a bad one. She does want him herself—that’s all I say. ‘Pourquoi faires’ you ask—or rather, being too shy, don’t ask, but would like to if you dared or didn’t fear I’d be shocked. I CAN’T be shocked, but frankly I can’t tell you either. The situation belongs, I think, to an order I don’t understand. I understand either one thing or the other—I understand taking a man up or letting him alone. But I don’t really get at Mrs. Brook. You must judge at any rate for yourself. Vanderbank could of course tell you if he would—but it wouldn’t be right that he should. So the one thing we have to do with is that she’s in fact against us. I can only work Mitchy through Petherton, but Mrs. Brook can work him straight. On the other hand that’s the way you, my dear man, can work Vanderbank.”
One thing evidently beyond the rest, as a result of this vivid demonstration, disengaged itself to our old friend’s undismayed sense, but his consternation needed a minute or two to produce it. “I can absolutely assure you that Mr. Vanderbank entertains no sentiment for Mrs. Brookenham—!”
“That he may not keep under by just setting his teeth and holding on? I never dreamed he does, and have nothing so alarming in store for you—rassurez-vous bien!—as to propose that he shall be invited to sink a feeling for the mother in order to take one up for the child. Don’t, please, flutter out of the whole question by a premature scare. I never supposed it’s he who wants to keep HER. He’s not in love with her—be comforted! But she’s amusing—highly amusing. I do her perfect justice. As your women go she’s rare. If she were French she’d be a femme d’esprit. She has invented a nuance of her own and she has done it all by herself, for Edward figures in her drawing-room only as one of those queer extinguishers of fire in the corridors of hotels. He’s just a bucket on a peg. The men, the young and the clever ones, find it a house—and heaven knows they’re right—with intellectual elbow-room, with freedom of talk. Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box. You’ll tell me we go further in Italy, and I won’t deny it, but in Italy we have the common sense not to have little girls in the room. The young men hang about Mrs. Brook, and the clever ones ply her with the uproarious appreciation that keeps her up to the mark. She’s in a prodigious fix—she must sacrifice either her daughter or what she once called to me her intellectual habits. Mr. Vanderbank, you’ve seen for yourself, is of these one of the most cherished, the most confirmed. Three months ago—it couldn’t be any longer kept off—Nanda began definitely to ‘sit’; to be there and look, by the tea-table, modestly and conveniently abstracted.”